Case Study: Major League Soccer achieves improved Kubernetes visibility and cost savings with Sysdig

Major League Soccer - Customer Case Study

Major League Soccer (MLS), led by Brian Aznar (director of engineering), needed to consolidate a hybrid stack—microservices on AWS with Docker/CoreOS Fleet and a legacy Drupal monolith in colo—into a more supportable, efficient cloud platform. Key challenges included containerizing the monolith for consistency, managing complex container networking and visibility, and understanding performance tradeoffs (e.g., a noted 250ms Drupal hit) while reducing infrastructure waste.

MLS hired devops lead John Dodson and over six to seven months fully adopted Docker and Kubernetes (K8s), consolidating from ~75–80 EC2 instances to about 56 (with actual production on 34 beefy c4.xlarges and a worker cluster of 10+5 running ~130 pods). They standardized deployment, used Sysdig for Kubernetes-aware, kernel-level monitoring to track service response times, pod affinity, and hotspots, and as a result achieved higher infrastructure utilization, fewer critical incidents, and improved operational visibility and self-healing.

Major League Soccer

Brian Aznar

Director of Engineering